I'm curious how you think the 90s were fantastic. Headbanger's Ball was cancelled, everyone got dropped from the majors, many broke up, Metallica turned to crap, Pantera broke up, and At the Gates spawned 2 decades of mallcore. By the time DNB came out, traditional metal was completely marginalized and that album should have been heralded as the biggest concept album since Operation: Mindcrime. But it wasn't.
What? I never said the 90s were fantastic. I've argued the complete opposite. In fact, the only bands I religiously listened to in the 90s aside from Soundgarden, Tool (*around 96) and Alice In Chains were bands from the early to mid 80s. I listened to
Cowboys from Hell and
Vulgar Display of Power quite a bit too, but after that I just gave up. Phil had to push his "WE'RE HARDCORRRRREEEE!!!" shit and the songs suffered for it. He actually sounded awesome on those two albums though. Did you edit your first post in response to something DW said?
Well, metal in the 90's WAS fantastic, unless of course you're talking about making any sort of living playing it.
The 90's got rid of glam and forced metal to be serious and introspective and, well, not dumb and insipid.
Too much of it became all about death metal, which is cool if that's your thing, but it wasn't mine and that's about the only non grunge
metal genre that got any real attention for a very long time. Also, I do like a lot of the bands you listed but I had no desire to listen to much of their earliest work. It also took Opeth to get me to give many of the melodeth (not the same I know) bands a real listen. Maybe my perspective was just skewed, because I
was looking forward to playing metal in a band.
Also, my main argument wasn't even necessarily that there wasn't any good metal out there in the 90s. You actually are not wrong about that. The problem as I said before is that it was all pushed so far underground as to become obscure. The only way to hear a lot of these bands was to take a risk on an unknown (or have read about them in a magazine and still take a somewhat unknown risk), or be lucky enough to have friends that have done that for you. I actually found out about Solitude Aeturnus this way right as
Into the Depths of Sorrow had been released via friend. We did not have that problem when MTV actually played music videos (not even counting Headbanger's Ball) and many metal genres besides death and nu were filling up arenas. You know, when it was still MTV and not YoMTV and then later what we now have.
I wouldn't have even known about Opeth had I not randomly purchased an Iron Maiden tribute album that had them on it. This was in '99 too when you could actually find some decent reviews online. I actually didn't know though, based off of what was on that tribute album that they were in fact a type of death band; and none of the reviews actually mentioned that at all. So I ended up ordering their first three albums, excepting something entirely different, and was like "What the fuck?" as soon as the growling kicked in. After those discs were sitting on my shelf for about two weeks though collecting dust, I just thought "Fuck it, I paid a lot of money for these, so I may as well try to enjoy them". I ended up doing housework all day with the discs playing in the background and suddenly they just clicked. Around that time too was when I started listening to Iced Earth, a band I knew absolutely nothing about, but I kept seeing random advertisements in magazines for them so I gave them a shot due to
The Dark Saga cover and me being a comic book nerd.
You know what though? I would almost certainly not have heard of Nevermore until many years after I did had I not heard them on a Judas Priest tribute album, doing their cover of "Love Bites". When I heard that, I thought "HOLY SHIT!". And personally, I think they blew the original away big time. Ended up buying Politics and was left speechless, and I knew right then that I had a brand new favorite band. Ironically, when I asked my best friend what he thought about it, he said "the songs all sound too similar", but then for some unknown reason decided to randomly buy DNB when it was released. He became completely enamored with the band then and couldn't stop gushing over that album.